Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Gaming Rundown Q1 (and other Updates)

Note: The latest History of Superhero RPGs list will be up next
week. I like to post those on the week opposite our new Play on Target
episodes. I hope to have some additional news and incentives regarding my
gaming history lists next week as well.

FIRST QUARTER
CAMPAIGN UPDATES

Thought I’d give a quick rundown of play and campaign
activity for the first quarter of 2014 (to establish my gamer bona-fides???). I want to get a better sense of what we actually get done in three months. All of the f2f games play out bi-weekly; the online games play out
weekly but have a higher missed session percentage. If I’ve previously posted a
campaign overview, I’ve linked to that.

The New Dragon (Action Cards/L5R):Five sessions (missed one in February).
The current arc began with the group finding a lost valley in the northern woods of their province. There they discovered a hidden minor clan. I borrowed concepts from the
recent L5R Book of Earth supplement. The PCs intervened to stop a Bloodspeaker assault on
the valley. They rescued the survivors and crossed paths with an agent of their
mysterious nemesis. Once again they saw signs that their adversary seems
interested in the magics and lore of the five old non-human races.

The characters traveled back to Maru Katei and reported to their daimyo. The
brought with them junior samurai of the hidden clan, as well as a young but
untrained shugenja. We had some political discussions and negotiations and they
struggled to figure out how they would present these matters to the Emperor. Later we dealt with some of the complexities of their roles in the clan and I ran a
session focusing on the Bon Festival and their everyday lives and
relationships. We moved the campaign forward to Winter- which included new events and seasonal actions.

First Wave: Series Three (Mutants & Masterminds/Roll20): Eight sessions.We began the third (and final) arc of this
superhero campaign in medias res. The group fought the Carnival of Shadows (a
City of Heroes reference) at an amusement park. They discovered that these
villains, as well as some recent ones, had been extra-dimensional incursions.
They also met a female version of Nightcrawler who appeared at the end of the
fight, suffering memory loss.

Next the group faced
the threat of Doctor Apocalypse who inundated New York with a freak weather
storm. The group defeated his massive Doombot. This in turn led them to The
Destroyers, former Cabal agents who had been hired to assist the mastermind. They
fought in the Destroyers HQ and then took out Apocalypse. From this, and Lady
Nightcrawler’s recovered memories, they began to piece together the real threat
facing them.

While the Cabal, who
had once ruled their world in shadows, had been destroyed- their legacy
remained. The Cabal had raided other worlds and dimensions. Now forces from
those dimensions had decided to destroy the Cabal’s homeworld using a
hyperdimensional weapon split into three parts. The PCs would have to figure
out a way to track those, travel there, and break the weapons or else see their
dimension annihilated. After consultation with various experts, the PCs fought
their way into a Cabal base and discovered a gate. They traveled through- with some strange fallout from Thor and Mister Miracle due to their singular nature
from the Prime world. The first dimension featured a Steampunk society which
had been twice ravaged by the Cabal. The group intervened to assist one of the
few remaining heroes- The Spiderman. He alerted them to strange goings on at
the Galactic Railway Yard.

Ocean City Interface (Action Cards):Six
Sessions. This campaign opened with a fantasy arc. Players made up their
characters, members of a mercenary company which had suffered losses. They took
an assignment to quietly seize a remote valley, to be followed by further
instructions. On arrival they checked the area, discovered a travelling
carnival in the valley, and negotiated with some locals. More importantly they
came across an Orc Raiding party also targeting the area. After bargaining with
the local lord, they engaged in a series of battles with the Orcs, eventually
emerging the victor- with some minor losses.

Their new orders led
the main members of the company (i.e. the PCs) to a magically sealed door in
the valley wall. Inside they discovered a massive ancient aqueduct system.
Though old, it was not unguarded. Evading pursuit, they reached a chamber which
housed the water purification relic they’d been hired to steal. The theft,
however, collapsed portions of the retaining walls and the group made a
desperate dash out to escape.

At which point the
PCs realized that they were in a simulation of some kind. They woke up in the
real world of City of Ocean in the year 203X. Somehow they’d been dragged into
a mysterious VR game- though much more real and dynamic than any they’d seen
before. They discovered new contact information in their phones- with the real
world names of their fellow players. They made contact and discovered a sixth
name in their lists, a man who had been murdered several days beforehand.

The group set off in
various directions trying to uncover the mystery of this murder, how they’d
been unwillingly transported into a game, and what Ocean City Interface was.
They encountered several bizarre incidents and rumors. Then they found
themselves again drawn into another world- this time a “Hub” for Ocean City
Interface which called itself Atlantis. They discovered others had also been
invited into the simulation, but their own accounts had weird errors. Returning
to the real world again, they pressed forward with their rinvestigation. They encountered
an exorcist who claimed that children had been infected by “Atlantaen Mind
Worms.” Shortly after the group found themselves attacked by Headspacers who’d
rented their minds out.

Note: Two of the six
sessions covered character creation (once for the Sellsword portal and once for
the characters OCI selves). In each case I managed to get at least an hour or
two of play in as well. I think we’re keeping the pacing up.

Heroes of Yanzhou Province (White Mountain, Black River): Four sessions. We restarted this Wushu game we’d put on hiatus
a couple of years ago. We added a new player and I spent some time producing
better player aids for the martial arts (printed cards to make their choices
easier). The group encountered a fleeing martial artist and invited him to
join their company. They traveled to Only Six Devils, where they learned some
of the secrets of the city and made connections to their visions. Gaining sponsorship,
they agreed to participate in the local tournament- a series of challenges
culminating in a fight and their choice of ancient item. We got through the
preliminaries and the first events. However changes in schedules meant that we’ve
once again had to put this on hiatus. I hope we’ll return to this in
the future (especially since I made up those nice cards).

Changeling Lost Vegas (Fate Accelerated/Changeling the Lost):Five Sessions. We had some
serious game bumps due to illness and scheduling. That’s the cost for running
at 10PM on a Monday. This quarter began with the group following up on a threat
to their friend/ally, the Born-Again Werewolf Lucas. That led to them blowing
up a festival and taking down Wayne Newton and his band of supernatural
hunters. Back at the estate, the group dealt with the personal fallout of that-
and the difficulty of having guests on site. They began to piece together the
events which had cost several Changelings in the Freehold their identity and security.
A Hob Auditor sent them down into the Goblin Casinos to gather information.
Finally the group met with the Spring Court again and John the Smith was
accepted as a member of the Summer Court.

Heroes of Tamris (13th Age)Six Sessions. We began with our group hunting down a special herb
to counteract poisonings in our city. We found a strange town and fought some
ice trolls. Investigating further, we found more members of the Cult of the
Crying God hiding in an abandoned castle. We took them out and released the
wind spirit they’d been holding. On our return to Tamris, we discovered that
our actions had helped reduce the brunt of an undead assault from across the
waters.

After a little
downtime we heard about occult murders in the city and pursued those. We found
the source but he escaped. We did manage to kill a number of duped cultists. We
followed up and eventually located a ruined city down the shoreline which more
cultists had set up as a staging point for an invasion. We brought in other
forces and killed them. We then headed out to a northern town to act as
observers. The GM stopped the campaign there. He had stated several times he
didn’t like fantasy, but he made a good faith effort with the game. I liked 13th Age and I would
definitely play it again if I wanted to play more classic fantasy.

Total: Twenty-eight
sessions run in campaigns. Six sessions played in campaigns. Additionally four
sessions played in one shots (Monster of
the Week, Kagematsu, Dungeons and Draperies, and La Resistance) and three sessions run in one shots (Kingdom and Owl
Hoot Trail).